Finally, here it is! My "My First GUADEC" post. It’s been three months since I have been working on my GSoC project, and as the project itself and GSoC approach their final days, I would like to talk about my GUADEC experience.
Ever since the GSoC results were announced, I had been aware of the fact that GSoC students, not only get to attend but also get an opportunity to present their work at the annual GNOME Conference called GUADEC, which brings together users and enthusiasts from all over the world. Words are not enough to express the kind of excitement I’ve had for attending this.
Past, Present, and Future
When GSoC started and my involvement in the GNOME community
increased, I spent a lot of time understanding and discovering how the community and it’s Software had evolved from the day they were conceived to the day I find myself writing this post, little by little with tiny increments, while the history was intriguing, it made me more curious about the future. GUADEC was just the place where there were talks about porting the existing widgets to GTK 4, new features in existing widgets, and plans for minor upgrades in GTK 3.99 and major upgrades planned for GTK 4.
Open Source Creative Software
I have never had the money to be able to afford the suite of creative software that Adobe Creative Cloud offers namely Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, etc. But despite this, I have always been a fan of digital content creation. It is in times like these that open-source software’s like GIMP, Inkscape, Kdenlive and Blender come in to save the day, for many enthusiasts and developers who wish to take part in the creating and using these amazing software.
Ryan Gorley’s session on Freelancing with Free Software addressed the same topic, about the kind of opportunities that free-software presents to an enthusiast who can eventually turn into a freelancer without the help of the costly proprietary software. This was my favorite session in this year’s GUADEC. Ryan Gorley also walked the audience through his work-flow for creating content like promotional videos etc., revealing the fact that GNOME’s promotional video was created using Blender. (aha !)
Social Events
If you have attended GUADEC you will know about these, but if not, and you think that the whole conference was about a bunch of people talking about tech-jargon, you are wrong! Social events introduced the GNOME community to the various talents its members had been hiding, be it cooking, making cocktails, or knitting, there’s a whole spectrum here. Ain’t that the best!
The Lightning Talks
Last but not the least, The Lightning talks, which were to be given by GSoC and outreachy students. It was time for me to present my work to the community and honestly, I was nervous about it a few days before GUADEC. I along with Antonio’s help prepared the slides for my three-minute-long presentation, and together we did some trial runs for the same to review the sequence and timings. GUADEC started and seeing so many people deliver talks and sessions about various topics familiarised me with the whole thing as a result of which my presentation went well. Also now we know that Felipe Borges has a really cute cat.
So, these were the highlights of my GUADEC experience, and I look forward to more of these in the future.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊)
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